Baseball musings

Perhaps no single thing in America marks a beginning with quite the stamp that the game of baseball provides. A diversion? Sure. Merely a game? Most definitely.

And yet ...

The renewal promised by spring and the passing of Easter comes to full fruition when professional baseball teams take the field in earnest and folks yawn, stretch and head outdoors en masse. Baseball’s Opening Day is the gateway to what will flower as the “Summer Game.” Just as football defines fall, baseball sets the course for spring and lounges forward at a pace constructed for leisure.

American poet Walt Whitman learned the value of baseball while working as a journalist in Brooklyn, saying, “Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms. ... The game of ball is glorious.”

Indeed, today, we’ll also note the words of others about what was once known as the National Pastime.

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“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” -- Rogers Hornsby, late Hall of Fame second baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals

“The one constant through all the years ... has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past. ... It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.” -- Terrance Mann, “Field of Dreams”

The Ball once struck off,

Away flies the Boy

To the next destin’d Post

And then Home with Joy.

— The poem “Base-Ball,” from “A Little Pretty Pocket Book, 1744

“There’s a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh 46 years ago. That’s baseball.” -- Ernie Harwell, former baseball radio announcer

“There’s no crying in baseball.”– Jimmy Dugan, “A League of their Own”

“They contained precisely the same rubbery, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby puerile mustard.”– Journalist H.L. Mencken on the ballpark hot dog in 1880

We’re talkin’ baseball!

Kluszewski, Campanella.

Talkin’ baseball!

The Man and Bobby Feller.

The Scooter, the Barber, and the Newc,

They knew ‘em all from Boston to Dubuque.

Especially Willie, Mickey, and the Duke.

— Talkin’ Baseball (“Mickey, Willie and the Duke”), Terry Cashman

There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;

There was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile on Casey’s face.

And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,

No stranger in the crowd could doubt ‘twas Casey at the bat.

-- “Casey at the Bat,” Ernest Thayer

“A good friend of mine used to say, ‘This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.’ Think about that for a while.”– Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh, “Bull Durham”

“I see great things in baseball; it’s our game – the American game. It will take our people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous dyspeptic set, repair those losses and be a blessing to us.”– Walt Whitman